


Hotel California

by amelia_petkova



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Drama, Gen, Halloween, Holidays, Humor, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-04
Updated: 2010-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-08 17:14:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amelia_petkova/pseuds/amelia_petkova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean takes Sam to the Winchester Mystery House in San Diego, California on Halloween.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hotel California

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my LJ in December of 2009.
> 
> Disclaimer: Sam and Dean Winchester are the property of _Supernatural_. The song lyrics are from "Hotel California" by the Eagles.
> 
> The story takes place during Season 2, though there are no real spoilers for any events before that. The Winchester Mystery House is located in California. You can visit [the official website](http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/). Please bear with some creative liberties; although I did research, I have never been there myself. That being said, I am not making up the bit about birthday parties. The theory on the reason behind the haunting near the end is all my own doing. Many thanks to my beta-reader, [lotesse](http://lotesse.dreamwidth.org/).

The California sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Sam Winchester glared at his brother.

"Why won't you tell me where we're going?"

Dean grinned. "Just relax. You'll enjoy it once we get there."

"We just got out of a haunted movie set. That wasn't enough? Besides, the last time you said I'd enjoy something, we ended up at a casino. And you got us kicked out at 2 a.m."

"It was fun while we were there!"

"That cocktail waitress _threw_ her _tray_ at you," Sam said slowly and clearly.

Dean's eyes grew misty. "Yeah, she did. What a woman."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Fine. You know what? I give up. Wake me when we get there." He slouched down in the seat and closed his eyes. It _was_ a nice day: sunshine, warm air through the open windows, and a smooth highway. The kind of setting that could almost convince you that there were no such things as monsters, if you didn't already know that the daytime was little protection against evil.

Dean chuckled gleefully.

#

"Wakey-wakey, Sammy. We're here!"

Sam opened his eyes. "No."

Dean's grin put the Cheshire Cat to shame. "It'll be fun."

"We are _not_ touring the Winchester Mystery House!"

"But it's Halloween. Get into the spirit of things."

Sam narrowed his eyes at the pun. "Don't make me hit you."

"C'mon, Sam, we've earned a vacation. Just one day spent doing some touristy crap and then we'll get back to business."

Sam looked at the bizarre, multi-acre building rising up before them. After a minute, he said, "That place can't really be haunted."

"It might. Dad wrote a few notes on it." Dean waved the small book under his brother's nose like a dog treat. Sam batted it away. Dean shrugged and went in for the kill. "If you say no to this, I'll drag you to another strip club."

Sam shot out of the car. "The Mystery House, it is!"

Dean snickered and unbuckled his seat belt. "You're so repressed."

"I'm _not_ going to another strip club with you."

"Hey, strippers are just doing their job. That dancer only wanted to be your friend."

Sam shuddered. "Yours was all right. Mine was five feet away and I still wanted a shower."

Together the brothers crossed the parking lot, joining other tourists as they made their way towards the most peculiar building in the United States.

#

Sam stared at the list of services in the lobby. "This place does _birthday parties_," he said.

"No kidding," Dean said and came over to look. "Awesome. We can come back here for your birthday."

"That can't be a good idea."

"You're the one who said this place wasn't haunted," Dean reminded him.

"It just seems like tempting fate."

"Two tickets," Dean said to the teenage employee behind the counter.

"Have fun!" she chirped and smiled broadly at him.

Dean leaned closer and lowered his voice. "So just between you and me, is this place really haunted?"

The girl's eyes grew wide. "Definitely. This one time," she whispered, "I was getting ready to leave and turned off the lights. I came back because I forgot my purse and all the lights were back on!"

"Terrifying," Dean agreed with a straight face. He gestured to himself and Sam. "You know, my brother and I might be relatives of the lady who built this place—our last name is Winchester."

"Get out!"

"It's true."

"We do flashlight tours at night on Halloween," she said, looking up at him through her eyelashes. "You should check it out."

"I might do that. Have a nice day." He moved aside to let a family buy tickets.

"Cute kid," Dean said once they were out of earshot.

"I have two words for you: jail bait."

"I know."

"The next tour is about to start," Sam said. He set his shoulders and sighed. "Let's get this over with."

The brothers took a place at the back of a group of about fifteen other tourists. Their guide, a middle-aged woman with a nametag that said "Kate," led them down a high-roofed hallway with many doors.

"Welcome to the Winchester Mystery House," Kate said. "Sarah Winchester began work on it in 1884. Before this time she had suffered the loss of her infant daughter, Annie, in 1866 and her husband, William, in 1881. William had inherited the Winchester Rifle fortune from his father, which upon his death left Sarah a very wealthy woman. During her mourning, she took to Spiritualism as a source of comfort."

The tour guide stopped at the base of a staircase. Other groups could be heard in the distance, many footsteps clattering on the hardwood floors.

Kate continued. "After consulting with a medium, Sarah moved from Connecticut to California and bought this property. At the time it was only an eight-room house. Today, the house has over 160 rooms." She paused before leading the group up the staircase. "Please, only go where I go. Do _not_ wander off on your own. In Sarah Winchester's day, the servants were given maps. Some doors open onto the outside of the house several floors up. Everything is clearly marked but do not trail behind. Parents, keep an eye on your children."

"I'm surprised we didn't have to sign a release form," Sam said quietly.

The building they walked through followed no logic. Doors opened onto solid walls. Staircases led to ceilings. Hallways took a dizzying number of turns. A few of the doors were marked off with signs that said "Steep Drop."

The tour guide continued, "Although considered eccentric by everybody in the area, Sarah Winchester's money was good enough to overcome any of the construction workers' doubts. She held séances regularly and slept in a different room every night to escape any of the particularly vengeful spirits."

"And that worked?" demanded a primly-dressed young woman whose attitude screamed "hard-core skeptic."

Kate smiled a little too brightly and said in a voice that was just a bit too sugary-polite, "Sarah Winchester lived to be 82 years old, so we may assume that it did."

The skeptic sniffed dubiously.

The guide continued her speech throughout the house, spouting bits of trivia along the way. The children in the group were delighted by the sheer weirdness of the house. Dean almost went into convulsions of laughter when a small boy kept asking, "But what's it _for_?" after seeing a stained glass window placed on an interior wall.

The séance room was the last stop. The room was kept in its original state, with few furnishings: a cabinet, arm chair, a table, and pen and paper set next to an Ouija board atop the table. A hush fell over the group. The silence stretched on. Sam saw a little boy poke his sister. She shrieked and jumped straight up.

"Jeff, stop that," their father scolded over the little girl's wails. As soon as the father's back was turned, she stamped on her brother's foot.

Sam and Dean were the last to leave the room. About to cross the threshold, Sam heard a scratching noise. He turned around. The planchette was twitching across its board. Small wiggles, like a mouse creeping from its hole. He looked sidelong; Dean saw it, too.

Sam stepped closer to the table and knelt so that his head was level with the board.

"Is something the matter?" Kate asked.

"Just have to tie my shoe," Sam said. He fiddled with the laces.

Dean grinned at the guide. "My brother never can keep his shoes tied. I should get him a pair of Velcro ones, like a toddler."

Sam sneered at him. The trio swept from the room.

In the spirit of good capitalism, the tour ended at the entrances to the gift shop and café. Kate reminded everyone about the flashlight tours at night and guided walks through the gardens, and bid them have a good afternoon. The group dispersed.

Sam and Dean ordered coffee and sat at a table in the café.

"What did it say?" Dean asked.

"Just one word." Sam scribbled on a notebook pulled from his shirt pocket and pushed it to the center of the table. "'Open.'"

"Well, _that's_ cheerful." Dean drummed his fingers on the notebook.

"Did the guide see?"

"Probably not. But who knows what kinds of crazy shit the employees see here? For all we know, they don't get their first paychecks until they've seen a ghost."

"Yeah." Sam chewed on his lip. "So, what do we do now?"

Dean didn't even pause. "Find it and hunt it down."

"But this one's different. As far as we know, the ghost hasn't hurt anyone. You'd think the guides would advertise lurid murders to reel in more tourists."

"It could just as easily be one of those ghosts who wanted to kill Sarah Winchester. No reason to wait until after it hurts somebody."

"Time for research, then."

Dean sighed. "Sammy, you need to spend less time on research."

#

They found a public library within a half-hour from the Winchester Mystery House. Patrons and employees filled the building, but the small area set aside for records was quiet. Sam scrolled through microfilms while Dean studied John Winchester's journal.

"Any luck?" Dean asked after a half-hour. He slumped down in his seat.

"A little," Sam said. He removed the third roll of microfilm from its machine and inserted the last roll. "A lot of it's just longer descriptions of what the guide said but there's a few other things."

"Let's hear it."

He turned the chair around to see Dean better. "Okay, so after Sarah Winchester's husband died, she visited that medium who convinced her to move to California. Nobody completely agrees on what the medium said but the most common version of the story is that Sarah was told that her family had died because of the angry spirits of people who'd been killed by Winchester rifles. The only way to escape the spirits' wrath was to move and begin construction on a house that would last every hour of every day for the rest of her life."

"Not very logical," Dean complained. "When have we ever heard of any ghost doing that? You'd think they would just go ahead and kill her, if they really were that angry."

"Yeah, I know. But supposedly there were 'good' ghosts who would protect her from the 'bad' ones so long as she held the séances every night and built the house according to their directions."

"What, good ghosts like Casper? _That's_ one I hadn't heard before. Anything else?"

Sam glanced at the notes he'd put on his laptop. "The construction went on for almost 40 years. There's 40 bedrooms, 17 chimneys, and 10,000 window panes. She loved the number 13 and supposedly you can see all sorts of things in groups of 13 in the house. But there's no weird deaths, no construction atop Indian burial mounds, nothing like that. It seems like Sarah was the strangest thing in that place. What did you find?"

"Dad has just one page on this place. It's mostly information on Sarah Winchester before she moved to California. He did find one weird thing: during the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906, she was trapped in her bedroom for a few hours. When the employees got her out, she had all work on the front part of the house stopped immediately."

"Huh." Sam picked up the notebook, his fingers sliding across the well-worn pages. There was a pencil sketch of the Mystery House, its lines smudged. Lines of handwriting were scribbled close together around the illustration. "Maybe she had an encounter with a spirit?"

"Could be. Too bad we still don't know exactly what kind of spirit we're dealing with. Have you ever heard of anything like this?"

Sam sighed. "I never saw anything like it. We'll just have to figure it out as we go." He glanced idly at the screen but then narrowed his eyes. "Listen to this: that séance room is located in the _physical_ heart of the house. When Sarah was alive, she was the only person allowed to go in there. She went there every night to speak with those spirits she thought were friendly. It says she was interested in automatic writing—that's what the pen and paper we saw were for."

"That makes things more interesting. That or the Ouija board could have opened all sorts of things," Dean said, now alert.

"If anything _is_ going on, it's probably in that room. Go back tonight?"

"We better. It is Halloween, after all. All sorts of crap is going to be going on."

A pair of children passing by stared at the Winchesters, goggle-eyed. They then ran off around a corner, saying, "Crap!" in loud, delighted voices.

Sam and Dean wasted no time in exiting the library, one step ahead of a parental scolding.

"Halloween." Sam mused. "Did Dad ever take you trick-or-treating? I don't remember it at all."

"A couple times. There were probably photos somewhere. I asked him once about it and he just muttered something about too much candy corn. Then he got back to lecturing me about danger spots on Halloween night."

#

They spent the afternoon wandering around the area, buying more salt and hashing out theories as to what exactly had gone on inside the house during its construction. Halloween fell on a weekday that year. They saw children depart from schools in costume, where they had held parties during the day, experiencing nothing scarier than consuming too much candy before watching _The Nightmare Before Christmas_.

"I wonder if those spirits followed her from Connecticut to California," Sam mused. They strolled down a sidewalk in San Jose. Jack-o-lanterns sat on the front stoops of businesses and apartments. Storefront windows had displays of marshmallow-like ghosts and toy cats. All around them was all the sweetness of Halloween with none of the holiday's bite.

Dean shrugged. "We've heard of that happening with poltergeists. Sometimes they follow families who move to escape them."

"Yeah, but nobody ever reported any supernatural activity before she moved! All that happened back East is that she was told she was _going_ to be haunted."

"We'll find out tonight."

#

 

The parking lot at the house was almost full when they returned after dark. The house loomed up, an enormous shadow lurking against the black Halloween sky. The lights were turned on in only a few of the rooms. Some of the lights blinked, as though they were candles, and one window went black.

"I'd feel better if we could bring more gear in," Dean complained for the third time.

Sam made a face. "I know. But this place is a historical site; they'd never let us in with bags." They carried small guns tucked inside their coats, rock salt, hip flasks of holy water, and the script for an exorcism if needed.

The lobby had been busy during the day. Now, it was packed. Several visitors came dressed in costume. They saw three zombies (who looked just a little too accurate for comfort), several ghosts, a pair of fairy princesses wearing wildly impractical wings, and a pirate.

A different employee staffed the ticket counter. Older and male, and thus less likely than the daytime employee to succumb to flirtation. Dean grinned anyway. "We were here earlier today and the employee told us to come back for the flashlight tours. Do we have to pay again?"

"Do you still have your ticket stubs?"

The Winchesters produced the bits of paper that had been wadded up in their pockets.

The employee nodded. "Go right on in. It's a Halloween special." He handed a flashlight to each of the brothers. "The next tour will start in a few minutes. Have a blast!"

"We'll never forget it," Sam said with a straight face.

"They'll probably take us along the same route as before," Dean said quietly. "We'll split off after a few minutes and run ahead to the séance room."

Sam watched for eavesdroppers. "We'll have to move fast; I think groups stop by that room at least every ten minutes."

The tour guide was also different. No one recognized them. The guide gave the speech about staying together, even more so now that the tour would be conducted in the dark.

All the lights in the rooms above the ground floor were turned off. Each person held a flashlight but the rooms continued to be filled with darkness. The flashlights only exaggerated it: everybody's steps bounced and the beams of light skittered around the rooms, gleaming on the many windows.

Once again, Sam and Dean lingered at the back of the group. They spoke to none of the other visitors, avoided making eye contact, and held their flashlights low. When the guide moved on to the second room, Dean tapped Sam's shoulder. Sam stepped back. They waited in the corner until the last person passed out of sight. Without speaking, they turned away in the opposite direction.

After a couple minutes of walking, Sam whispered, "If you get us lost, I'll kick your ass."

"Don't get your panties in a twist. I know where we're going." At that moment Dean opened a door and bumped into the brick wall behind it. "Don't even say it."

Over the next several minutes, Dean opened two more doors that led only to walls. He went up a staircase and hit his head against the ceiling at the top. Sam started laughing after he glanced around to make sure nobody else had heard the loud "thunk."

"Shut up!" Dean hissed. "You'll get us caught."

Sam collapsed on the stairs. He couldn't stop snickering. "You'll probably lead us right back to our tour group. They'll think we're ghosts and have heart attacks."

"It's because we just have the flashlights. All these staircases look the same in the dark."

"Whatever you say."

In the end, only luck led them to Sarah Winchester's séance room. After hearing no others coming or going, they slipped in and shut the door. There was no lock available to keep others from interrupting at the wrong moment. They placed the flashlights on the table. Dean laid out a circle of salt around the room. Sam pulled a lighter and white candle from his jacket pocket.

"Ready?" Sam asked. Dean nodded. The brothers took up positions on opposite sides of the table, the lit candle and Ouija board between them. Dean stood ready with his gun. Sam began to recite an incantation to summon any spirits present.

The candle flickered. Moments passed. No ghosts appeared, yet the air felt heavy. The shadows thickened against the lights. It was too silent. Sam finished the incantation and held his breath.

The door slammed open. Sam and Dean froze. A group of tourists saw them engaged in a ritual and screamed.

"What the hell are you doing?" the tour guide barked.

"We were just…that is…" Sam stuttered. Dean slipped the gun into his jacket before anybody saw it.

"Oh great, the Satanists are ruining Halloween," one of the visitors complained.

Dean glared. "Are not!"

"Get out of there now!" the guide told them. Sam blew out the candle and they left the room.

The guide gestured at a nearby employee. "Marcelle, would you take over this tour? I have some customers to deal with. Thanks." The woman started to give the standard speech about the séance room, while the first guide escorted them down the hallway. "Now then," he said, "what explanation do you want to give me for what just happened?"

"We saw the Ouija board move earlier today," Sam admitted.

The guide ran a hand through his hair. "Of _course_ it moved. It's remote controlled!"

Dean stared. "What?"

"Am I speaking too fast? _It's all rigged._"

"Are you serious?"

"That planchette wiggles at the end of every tour." The employee ticked off items on his fingers. "There are curtains on the second floor above an air vent; a light bulb that's _supposed_ to flicker; one of the rooms is kept cold on purpose." He raised an eyebrow at the Winchester brothers. "We usually don't have visitors turning up to do exorcisms, though."

"It wasn't exactly an exorcism," Dean began, professional pride winning over the instinct to deny everything.

The guide raised a hand and cut him off. "Don't tell me. I don't want to even guess what goes on inside your heads. I do know that you're leaving now and that you will be barred from this building for life."

The guide brought them to the exit. Despite the many shadows, Sam and Dean could find no opportunities to slip away. In the lobby their flashlights were taken away, their faces were examined by the employees present, and they were firmly escorted out of the building.

They sat in the car, staring at the house for a long time. Finally, Sam said, "I think that's the most embarrassed I've ever been."

"Don't worry; I'll embarrass you tomorrow. You'll get over it."

"I just can't believe we tried to summon up the spirit of a remote-controlled Ouija board."

Dean snickered. "Well, you were right about one thing—it's not haunted."

"Shut up."

Dean started the car. They drove through the large parking lot and paused at the stop sign at the end of the driveway. It was a mild night; the brothers had rolled down the windows and the radio hadn't been turned on yet. Something crunched on the gravel. They turned to see if another car was coming. A horse and carriage appeared in the distance. An elderly woman sat in the carriage, dressed in old-fashioned clothing. A uniformed man held the reins of the horse. None of figures spoke or acknowledged the car's presence. As the brothers watched, she gestured to the driver and the carriage rolled away towards the house, disappearing around a curve in the road.

Sam craned his neck but didn't see anything more. "Was that really—"

"I don't even want to know. Let's just get out of here."

Sam and Dean drove away from the Winchester Mystery House. The highway was dark, the full moon was encircled by a hazy ring, and they had a long time to pass before the end of Halloween night.

"Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light  
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim  
I had to stop for the night  
There she stood in the doorway;  
I heard the mission bell  
And I was thinking to myself,  
This could be heaven or this could be hell"  
\--"Hotel California" The Eagles


End file.
